III.

World War II and After

With the outbreak of World War II in 1939, almost all Americans and many exiles from Europe left Britain for Hollywood. Even the patriotic Korda, who had taken British nationality in 1936, was forced to complete the experimental Technicolor adventure, The Thief of Bagdad (1940), in Hollywood. The documentary movement, which John Grierson had established as the GPO Film Unit in the early 1930s, became the Crown Film Unit, and the Ministry of Information (MoI) maintained government control of production by approving and initiating scripts before releasing film stock for films to be made. Crown produced a number of important propaganda films, including two major achievements by Humphrey Jennings, Listen to Britain (1942) and Fires Were Started (1943). Alberto Cavalcanti, who had taken over from Grierson at the GPO Film Unit, moved to Ealing under Michael Balcon, taking a number of junior colleagues with him. This led to a number of documentary-influenced subjects being made within the commercial sector, including Convoy (Penrose Tennyson, 1940), The Foreman Went to France (Charles Frend, 1942), Nine Men (Harry Watt, 1943), Went the Day Well (Cavalcanti, 1943), and San Demetrio London (Frend, 1943).

Ealing became the focus for British realism, while the Korda tradition was kept alive solely by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger and their company, The Archers. Using, whenever they could, Korda actors and Korda technicians, they developed a series of challenging and experimental films: 49th Parallel (1941), The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), I Know Where I’m Going (1945), and A Matter of Life and Death (1946), among them.

Rank gradually extended its control of British film production throughout the 1940s. Apart from Denham, it absorbed Pinewood, Highbury, and Islington studios and developed huge distribution and exhibition outlets. During the war it financed Two Cities, which the Italian exile Filippo Del Guidice had formed in 1937, and Independent Producers. Among the films that Del Guidice supervised are two by Anthony Asquith—The Demi-Paradise (1943) and The Way to the Stars (1945)—and two by Carol Reed—The Way Ahead (1944) and Odd Man Out (1947)—while at the latter, Powell and Pressburger (the Archers), Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat (Individual), and David Lean, Ronald Neame, and Anthony Havelock-Allan (Cineguild) were given unprecedented backing to write, produce, and direct, and the quality of British films took a further leap forward. After co-directing the MoI-inspired Millions Like Us (1943) and Waterloo Road (1944) for Gainsborough, Individual produced two of the most outstanding films of the period—The Rake’s Progress (1945) and I See a Dark Stranger (1946)—and Lean, the editor of such films as Pygmalion (1938) and One of Our Aircraft is Missing (1942), after establishing himself as a director at Two Cities with In Which We Serve (1942), went on to direct This Happy Breed (1944), Brief Encounter (1945), and Great Expectations (1946), featuring such actors as Rex Harrison, Trevor Howard, Celia Johnson, and Alec Guinness. Film costs were, however, escalating and the two patriotic Technicolor films Henry V (1944), co-written, produced, and directed by Laurence Olivier, and Gabriel Pascal’s Caesar and Cleopatra (1945) ran fiercely over-budget, the latter, at £1.27 million, becoming the most expensive film ever produced in Britain at the time. Rank misguidedly believed that, although others had failed, he could break into the American market and continued to finance films from The Archers, such as A Matter of Life and Death (1946), Black Narcissus (1947), and The Red Shoes (1948), as well as the less expensive subjects, such as Green for Danger (1946), Captain Boycott (1947), and The Blue Lagoon (1948) from Individual. The days of the bottomless purse were over, however, and, in the 1950s, when Rank retrenched, many of those whom Rank had financed throughout the war left to work for Korda, who had re-established himself in England at Isleworth Studios, where he was responsible for Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949). With this further upheaval in British film production, “risk money” was again in short supply. The government finally established the National Film Finance Corporation (NFFC), the National Film Bank, which had long been advocated, and, also, set a tax on cinema admission—the Eady Levy—the revenue from which was to go directly to producers in Britain. The NFFC operated a revolving fund of £6 million and made loans to selected individual projects, while the Eady Levy attracted American producers such as Sam Spiegel and “Cubby” Broccoli to Britain.

Ironically, Ealing, under Balcon, was entering its most successful phase, giving European subjects a British dimension. In 1945, Cavalcanti, Charles Crichton, Basil Dearden, and Robert Hamer directed a portmanteau film of supernatural stories, Dead of Night, which can now be seen as a British response to the excesses of the German Expressionist film, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1919). Soon after, Harry Watt made a MoI-inspired film The Overlanders (1946), which dramatized the Australian contribution to the war, and Charles Crichton made Hue and Cry (1947), a British variation on the 1931 novel by Erich Kästner, Emil and the Detectives. More remarkable still was Robert Hamer’s It Always Rains on Sunday (1947), which converted the pessimistic mood of the Carné/Prévert film of the 1930s to the East End of London of the immediate post-war years. Ealing’s sense of Englishness gradually turned towards eccentricity with Passport to Pimlico (1949); Hamer’s masterpiece, Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), which featured Alec Guinness in a gallery of cameo performances; Charles Crichton’s The Lavender Hill Mob (1951) and The Titfield Thunderbolt (1953); and The Man in the White Suit (1951) and The Ladykillers (1955) by Alexander Mackendrick. Comedies or not, Ealing’s films were essentially “state of Britain” productions: Basil Dearden’s Frieda (1947) examined the British notion of “war-guilt”, while The Blue Lamp (1950) was the first film to establish the British bobby (policeman) as less of a law enforcer and more of a social worker. Ealing was, however, like the England it so often depicted, exhausted, worn out by the war and its subsequent privations, and it closed in 1959. One of its editors, Seth Holt, directed one of its final productions, the stylish, if mannered, thriller Nowhere to Go (1959), which proved the catalyst for a number of independent productions that were to follow—tough, “noirish” subjects such as Hell is a City (1960), Payroll (1961), and The Small World of Sammy Lee (1963).

If British cinema was for the most part weary, inspiration was to come from the English Stage Company, which presented new and sometimes controversial plays to British audiences. It found its focus in 1956 with its production of Look Back in Anger by John Osborne, which led to the coinage of the expression “angry young men” to describe a loose grouping of playwrights and novelists including Osborne, Arnold Wesker, Kingsley Amis, and John Wain. Allied to this group were such figures as Tony Richardson, Karel Reisz, and Lindsay Anderson. Through their movement, Free Cinema, they argued for artistic independence and a British cinema that was less attached to traditional values and past triumphs, and associated itself with contemporary concerns and aspirations. The model, notwithstanding a greater social commitment, was the French nouvelle vague (New Wave), which, by its spirit and sense of self-discovery, revealed a new range of cinematic possibilities. The historical moment was caught first, not by Free Cinema, but from the more traditional source of John and James Woolf’s Remus films, which produced Room at the Top (Jack Clayton, 1959), from the novel by John Braine, and which, for the first time in British cinema, broached “adult themes”. Osborne, Alan Sillitoe, David Storey, and other writers provided the literary base for a flurry of independently produced films from Woodfall, Bryanston, and Independent Artists, films such as Look Back in Anger (1959), Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), A Taste of Honey (1961), and This Sporting Life (1963). This last was a financial failure and the Rank Corporation, who distributed it, turned against supporting “kitchen-sink” dramas.

The new vitality, which Lindsay Anderson and his colleagues sought, took a new turn in the 1960s, led by youth culture with its emphasis on fashion and pop music. Britain, albeit with financial advantages to producers, became a focus for international film-making. In Blow Up (1966), the Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni visualized 1960s London as a commercially manipulated distraction from the unresolved political dilemmas that faced the country, a view of Britain shared by Joseph Losey, the expatriate American director who, with the stylish analyses The Servant (1963), Modesty Blaise (1966), and Accident (1967), took a disparaging perspective on its obsession with class and sex. Among other American directors, Richard Lester, who had directed the early jazz-pop oriented It’s Trad, Dad (1962), suddenly hit his stride with two modish films featuring the Beatles, A Hard Day’s Night (1964) and Help! (1965), and, in 1964, Roger Corman directed two of his most admired horror films, The Masque of the Red Death and The Tomb of Ligeia. Apart from Losey, the greatest impact from the United States was made by Stanley Kubrick with 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and A Clockwork Orange (1971), introducing technical standards previously unknown in Britain.